I am also planning to check out some of the linked books, but this has always been a challenge for me to wrap my head around!

The first thing you have to let go of when you're imagining this is the idea that anywhere near this number of people in prison is normal or okay in most Earth societies. And to do that, you have to understand why people in prison are in prison.

Like half of them are there for probation or parole violations. That means it's hard to tell why exactly they're there, but, looking at the breakdown of probation and parole violations I've defended, it's actually not super likely that this is because of a new crime conviction. People get dinged on probation/parole violations for stuff that's legal for other people to do, including marijuana and alcohol, or not calling the probation officer enough, or being homeless, or not having a job because you got fired because of your probation meetings.

Next, the bulk of people in and out of local jails are there for honestly just stupid nonsense. Misdemeanor assaults, trespasses, drug possessions. There's compelling evidence that these short stays in jail increase recidivism, which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense -- imagine your live being interrupted by an abrupt few months in jail. If you have family support, they might be able to retrieve your stuff from your place before your landlord leaves it all on a curb. You get an eviction on your record. You're fired. You might lose all your important documents if no one was available to get them from your apartment. And then you're spat back out with nothing, an overdrawn bank account, zero possessions except what you were arrested with, and told "now get a job or you're going back to jail."

Then there's mid-level cases that are felonies. Most people think felonies are Serious Business. They are -- in terms of consequences. The crimes that are felonies are defined in ways that are often absurd and ass-backwards. It's very hard to explain what I mean without just providing an example, so here goes.

In my state, there's a crime of "shooting at an occupied dwelling" (something clearly intended to be a law against drive-by shootings, which I would like to note were ALREADY ILLEGAL, it being illegal to attempt murder on people and to recklessly handle firearms etc., so the law was arguably totally unnecessary, but I digress). There is also a crime of discharging a firearm inside an occupied dwelling. This is not as bad of a crime as shooting at an occupied dwelling.

There is a notable case where a prosecutor chose to prosecute someone who shot inside a dwelling under the shooting at a dwelling law. Why? Because worser penalty is why. The higher Court, after appeal, ruled that a shooting done inside a dwelling is by default at a dwelling, since the dwelling is in fact in every direction from the shooter. Thus, every shooting in an occupied dwelling must be a shooting at an occupied dwelling. The less serious law is thus effectively nullified by the court.

I'll take it one step further. The law about shooting at an occupied dwelling also says that it doesn't have to be a gun, it can be a "missile." There's some language in there about how it has to cause significant risk of death or bodily harm. Despite that language, my most notable case under this law was the following facts:

One thirteen-year-old shot another thirteen-year-old with an Orbeez gun in a living room.

The judge refused to dismiss the charge. "Those things can put an eye out," she said. And thus the child was subject to felony liability for the drive-by shooting law for A FUCKING ORBEEZ GUN I SWEAR TO GOD I COULD NOT MAKE THIS UP IF I TRIED okay maybe I'm still a little mad

But the discussion on prison abolition tends to center not on these INCREDIBLY VAST MAJORITIES OF CASES where the law is stretched to fit the facts, where people weren't really hurt, where the police even generated the crime themselves perhaps by responding to a mental health crisis and provoking the situation until there are felony assault & battery on law enforcement charges.

Prison abolition discussions are all about what to do with murderers. Rapists. Abusers. Sex offenders.

To be clear, I believe there are some situations where a person will keep doing societal harm and will not stop. These situations are so shocking because they are so rare.

The first murderer I ever met was this guy who freely admitted what he did: he said he killed the guy who raped his daughter. He managed to get an incredibly low sentence out of the jury that heard the case. He was willing to pay the price of prison. He was honestly pretty interesting and willing to talk my visiting law student clinic through a lot of what had happened.

The first murder case I had, the client killed because of a sincerely held belief that he was in danger. The fact that this sincerely held belief was from an intense delusional psychosis makes it a deep tragedy.

Different places report different figures, but anywhere from half to 90% of the women in prison for murder are there for murdering an abusive spouse. Women don't fit under traditional definitions of self-defense, see; they don't wait until someone is coming at them ready to kill. Women shoot when the man is asleep. Women want to survive.

So even when you think of 'murder,' question this: why is heat-of-passion murder less bad in our system than premeditated murder? Premeditated murder, apart from serial killers, is a one-and-done thing. It's also much more common for female murderers to fall into the category of premeditation and for masculine to fall into heat of passion. People who murder when they're angry are an ongoing danger to society.

Prison abolition says: everything about this is wrong. Looking for an "alternative" is in many ways the trap question -- the wrong question. It's not about finding a different, better way to punish people. Maybe we still do need 1 in 100 of our current prisons to confine people who won't stop hurting others. Maybe a mental health system that's a tiny bit less pathetically anemic could help handle the load.

Prison abolition says: there's no reason to take this person out of society for x years, all of them at 100k/year expense to the taxpayers, subject to cruelty and dehumanization, in the interests of punishment, because it does too much harm. One year, nine months for possession of a meth pipe with residue? Go to a drug program, for god's sake. Two years, one month for larceny? Why spend more on locking the person up than they stole? Why lock them up where they can't pay restitution?

To use a real-life example:

Someone I know eighth-hand once seriously considered murdering someone who threatened very descriptively to assault his daughter, but instead chose to call the cops. If there was no alternative and no enforceable consequences, would he have stopped? If he didn't believe that the state would at least temporarily take away this guy's liberty would he have felt as though he had to act? I honestly don't know but it seems more likely.

(For the curious, this was all on Facebook, so the offender in question used his real name and was out on parole for domestic abuse, and I say that not to make a point that he is a bad person or whatever, just to clarify the situation.)

The point I'm trying to make is our incredibly terrible justice system is still a pressure valve. It tells people "here is something you can do instead of murder" and "if you do violence there are consequences, so maybe think it through".

Most of the prison abolition literature seems to center on A. the prison system is awful (100% endorsed) and B. we should have better social services (yep) and this will decrease crime (proven time and time again). I am very pro making our prison system more rehabilitative and also making it illegal for jobs to ask if someone is a former felon and abolishing prison labor because it provides a direct incentive to imprison more people.

But putting aside how prison abolition is a fantasy when there isn't the current political will to make our existing prisons have humane living conditions, I still can't understand how actual full-on prison abolition would work and you're clearly much more immersed in the justice system than I am, so I'm curious about your thoughts on the subject.

Want to make sure you've seen this post; I got both of these asks around the same time and since they're not quite the same I wanted to make sure I address both, but don't repeat too much material. That post talks a lot about the composition of people in prison, which is most likely not what you expect, and how even crimes defined as "serious" and "violent" are often some goddamn bullshit that the police inflated. Cleaning out a lot of that muck is at the core of prison abolition, I think.

But I'd love to dig into this too. You're talking about the justice system's overall purpose in society, and that's genuinely fascinating! Also about the causes of interpersonal violence and mitigation of those causes on a societal level! These are things I would love to study more; my exposure to theories on violence are a little limited.

Societies have justice systems. For what purpose?

A Marxist might say: to enforce the capital-holders' repressive power over labor. Ideas like: The law, in all its wisdom, forbids sleeping under a bridge equally to the rich man and the poor man. Evidence like: 90% of the people charged with crimes are under the federal poverty line +25%.

A conservative or authoritarian moralist, like a Christian Republican, might say: to enforce morals on a society that would be chaos without them. This flirts a little with what you're saying above. Ideas like: Society is a thin veneer and mankind is savage and violent by nature. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Do the crime, do the time. Vengeance, sayeth the lord.

A less authoritarian moralist, perhaps a liberal?: to rehabilitate the criminal. Prisons should have educational programs; probation should help people desist from lives of crime.

A socialist might say: to preserve the social contract. The justice system is meant to be a way to heal wounds done to society and prevent further harm. This is where you get the restorative justice movement. The idea of payment of restitution. Community service.

There are so many more.

Let's unpack the pressure valve theory that you're talking about.

This is that: if people are wronged, they would do something about it, unless there is a trusted system to do something about it for them. Evidence for it? You betcha: how many escalating feuds between gangs/families/factions/parties/etc. does history even have?

(Quick side note: There is some interesting criminological theory that Black people in inner cities are both under and over-enforced. For low-level crimes, they are over-enforced, suffering under more policing than their white counterparts; in terms of murder, they are under-enforced, as the murders of black people are often disregarded and forgotten, unsolved. The theory states that this is why gangs keep killing each other in revenge.)

You're also talking about the coercive power of the state. Threat of prison isn't the only coercive power that the state has, but it sure is an overused one around here. You don't want to come to court? We'll put you in jail! Don't pay your child support? Jail! You're mentally ill on the street? Jail!

But this doesn't explain everything about why people obey the government, right? I don't know that people file tax returns because they think they're going to jail if they don't. Doctors don't keep their medical files in systems up to HIPAA standards because they might go to jail if they don't. And you know what most of my clients do if they find out they have a warrant? They peacefully go to jail to turn themselves in.

The government's last response to resistance is violence, just like violence is a last resort in any interpersonal reaction. That's not the same as saying that all government power is based in violence.

(In fact, I have a theory that if mild-looking people who aren't bristling with guns, tasers, radios, body armor, etc., showed up to some of the scenes that call for police, they could take charge of a scene with much less violence taking place. I think personally they should try day-glo vests and clipboards and lanyards.)

I also think it's worthwhile to question whether the person who ended up calling the police really wanted to engage in violence -- theorists on violence basically say that most people don't want to, and therefore in the moment, if they can, if they're given escape hatches to take without losing face, they take those escape hatches. You have to train people really really hard, break them down and brainwash them into obeying orders, to get them ready to go shoot strangers in war. It takes the overwhelming pressure cooker of violent streets and constant trauma to make Black kids pick up guns, too. It's not overnight, it's not immediate. Violence is obvious, and there's bonkers level opportunities to de-escalate it. We are programmed to think it is more necessary than it is because we see heroes solving problems with violence all the time on tv and movies. But violence almost always, if not always, causes more problems than it solves.

But here's the other thing.

Did it work, calling the police, in that situation? Did a very descriptive threat of harm to that guy's daughter result in any additional protection for her? Or was it just charges for him, a constant ordeal in which her pain is paraded publicly for her, and then a short prison stay and he's out again to threaten her? Because that's my best case scenario. My worst case scenario on that would be: police say he hasn't yet done anything so there's nothing they can do. Because police don't protect.

What if we built a justice system around protecting people, not about authoritarian prison-based revenge once the harm is already done? I'd like that better.

woof. This is actually a rough question. And it's changed even in the ten years I've been practicing, because Google's in the shitter now!

Good news is, if you're in severe poverty, it's super easy: you tell the court you have no money and they appoint the public defender or a court-appointed attorney of some kind. Our line here is the federal poverty line +25%, and the judges play a little fast and loose with that. The horror of this is that something around 90% of criminal defendants probably fall into this category, depending on jurisdiction.

(If you are on any form of public assistance, you may also automatically qualify for a court-appointed attorney, so be sure to mention that.)

Other than that, if you're looking to hire... you can find lawyers with an internet search of some kind, but finding out whether they're any good is a totally different matter. Reviews are just not reliable, and I hope that doesn't make me sound like a dismissive snob -- obviously, the client's feelings about the representation matters a lot! Client relationships being good are part of the attorney's skill set! However, some of my most pain in the ass complainy clients are the ones where I literally did everything perfectly and got them a crazy good outcome. So that's my bad on managing their expectations. Some of my most grateful and thankful clients are from cases where I lost.

Now, I'm kind of an asshole, so if it was me, I'd probably try to meet with a few that I heard of as being good by word of mouth and ask them "if I wasn't going to hire you, who would you recommend I hire?" Because lawyers know which other lawyers are lazy and shitty. And honestly you can just tell them why you're asking that question. They should understand it's a big decision and they shouldn't get egotistical about it. I have a couple names right off the bat if anyone said that to me.

News articles can also be helpful. Lawyers who have done high-profile cases and not given flashy interviews, who have said neutral things to the press. Lawyers who are reported as having won jury trials. That kind of thing.

But sometimes the lawyer is just an old lady who's been doing this for thirty years and knows the court inside and out and just cannot be fucked to get this website straightened out. So outdated websites I would say are not necessarily warning signs.

If the lawyer seems to do literally any kind of case, their expertise is unclear, and the associates are all white guys that look like they could be brothers, maybe an orange flag.

oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then

If the Please Do Not Eat That Professional thinks it's inconsequential enough to be funny, then the concerned caller knows it's no big deal. When I was a kid my mom called poison control because I ate not one but several crayons, and their advice was to make sure I didn't stray too far from a toilet for a few hours because suppositories are made of wax, too.

Also several years ago I ate half a sandwich while wondering why the hell it tasted so funny only to realize the Goo Gone I'd been cleaning with was leaking, and did so onto my sandwich. Poison Control now has an online form where you can put in what you ingested/how much/when/etc. and someone basically triages those out, so the kid who just drank a bunch of drain cleaner isn't in line behind the kid who ate a crayon. I got a call like twenty minutes later from a nurse who told me I was fine.

Oh! And if you want to know what the tool looks like, it now gives a "this is not a real case" option to let you test it out, so I became a hypothetical worried patient who accidentally took 1000mg of ibuprofen (max dose should be 800) instead of 1000mg of acetaminophen (which has a max dose of 1000) and ran the entire thing. It took me less than two minutes from this:

To this:

Below this screenshot I was advised to drink some water and that if symptoms developed in the next four hours, I should only be concerned in certain cases (e.g. nausea is normal, heart palpitations are a problem).

So what if it's a serious problem? Suddenly, hypothetical Nina was cleaning xir bathroom sink and got hit with some Drano splashback with xir eyes and mouth open! Here's what the tool suggested. As soon as I selected that I'd gotten Drano in my eyes, this popped up:

So I hypothetically went to rinse my eyes, came back, and indicated it'd also gotten into my mouth and onto my skin. Here was the result:

And finally, hypothetical!Nina made an extremely bad decision, then decided this wasn't how xe wanted things to end after all. So I selected the option that says I'd attempted self-harm, and this popped up. (I didn't get it in the screenshot, but there's a drawing of a sad snail at the top of the screen. I think it's supposed to remind you someone is there, this just isn't the best route to reach them.)

It’s okay to sit down while doing anything in the kitchen. You don’t even need to be disabled or chronically ill. Your feet do not need any excuses. Rest them

It’s okay to cut potatoes in front of the tv while sitting on the couch.

Abled folks could learn a lot from the measures disabled folks take to adapt to their conditions and hack their environment and daily tasks so it benefits them in all the possible ways.

I just read a Fortune article the other day about the fact that some college students can't read a single sentence. One. They cannot parse the meaning of a single sentence. That's terrifying. (Here it is on Yahoo without the paywall, btw.)

The thing is that you do not have to be wholly illiterate to struggle with reading. About half of Americans have low literacy, meaning they read around a sixth grade level or less.

This puts publishers in a terrible position. They need to sell books to an audience that cannot read books made for adults but that doesn't want the simplicity of grade-school books. The books need real adult problems without the nuance, hence the therapy speak and the black-and-white thinking.

Another thing is that cognitive flexibility influences literacy, meaning the reverse is also true; cognitive inflexibility determines lower literacy. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to update your schemas or combine multiple pieces of information without being expressly told to do so. It also impacts whether you can identify the mismatch between what someone says and what they do, which is the gold standard way to avoid therapy speak.

Poor cognitive flexibility means you can't have messy situations, because then the reader doesn't know what to think. Everyone has to be sorted into Good Person and Bad Person, and if the Good Person does something that may seem Bad, then they become a Bad Person unless the text assures us that they are still Good.

You will see many positive Goodreads reviews for these books. I'm not saying every single person with a positive review for a book like that has low literacy, but it's more likely than not. The same thing that drives you insane is what compels other readers who can't handle more complex texts.

Basically what I am saying is that if you want something with nuance, as a reader or a writer, you probably need to seek out selfpub stuff. I know that a lot of selfpub is garbage specifically because of the lower barrier to entry, and a lot of good selfpub stuff is not highly rated because getting reviews takes time and energy.

(I'd like to say my own stuff is good but doesn't have a lot of reviews because that requires active solicitation and I'm busy. I'm competing with millions of authors, both selfpub and tradpub, who have larger budgets. Anyway.)

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

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"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."